The Strawbridge's Building

The Strawbridge's Building stands at eight hundred one Market Street as a limestone monument to a retail era that nearly collapsed under the weight of its own ambition. Designed by the Philadelphia firm Simon and Simon, this thirteen-story structure was built in stages between nineteen twenty-eight and nineteen thirty-one. The project was meant to be the crowning flagship for the Strawbridge and Clothier department store, but the onset of the Great Depression caused construction costs to balloon from an estimated six and a half million dollars to ten million dollars, leaving the company in a precarious financial position for years.